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I suppose the question is whether anyone here who's already familiar with AGS would be willing to prioritize working on porting AGS to Allegro 5 (and getting Mac porting functional) - essentially treating the task like a real job or work-for-hire over a specific period of time?

I have asked this specific question before and got little response - everyone is basically too busy with real work to commit like that

However they assure me that it will get done eventually.

I've been working on the iPhone/iPad port for some time now, and it's looking good, but just needs a little bit of art work to be complete!

Some of the icons will be based on existing icons in the PC version of the game, sized up, and some will be new icons based on my design. All the icons are pretty simple and the task should not take too long.

There are about 50 unique icons. If you include up/down states and alternate sizes, this works out to about 100 icons in total.

Wadjet Eye games can offer $250 for this work, with a deadline of 2 weeks from now (25th Feb 2012), preferably next week if possible.

If you are interested, PM me with an example of an icon you made, and I'll give you a complete list of the icons, states, and pixel sizes needed. I will also supply rough versions for each icon as a guide.

thanks,

Janet (Wadjet Eye Games)

[edit] We got someone! Thank you!

On a practical note, maybe not many coders here have access to Mac OS X and/or XCode? Maybe you should try to advertise this on a freelancer site, maybe one orientated towards Mac programming.

That's the second option if no one is interested. I'd prefer to work with someone who understands AGS if possible. I might just do it myself, but that wouldn't be until at least late this year, probably next year, which would be a shame.

Not much interest here... is it worth pointing out that Wadjet Eye would be willing to pay someone to do this port?

Fantastic news JanetC!!! Can't wait to get your games in my ipad...or iphone...Actually i installed a windows 7 in my mac just to play Primordia and Resonance!
When are you planning to hit the Appstore?

Cool! We want to release pretty soon but we haven't got a date yet!

Btw, it's not the 99 dollars that stop me to have a develop. account, i just wanted to be sure that the port is working, even if with jiggering...but i still can't have my build running without errors, i don't think it's a matter of having the apple license at all...or i'm wrong?

Not sure what you are asking here!

But, hmm, thinking further about this. If rain is in script module, it might be pretty slowing factor for weaker platforms. Is it possible to, for instance, disable it for PSP, where we had speed issues lately? Just a thought.

Linux is basically the same as PC in system requirements. We have no plans for a PSP release, so it shouldn't be an issue.

Is there maybe still a check for the platform to be Windows in place somewhere?

You are right. There is still some stray code that checks that it is windows. We will remove it and recompile.

[should be removed in the game script]

For some reason the game checks the platform it is running on. Only if the platform is "Windows" it will enable the rain plugin.

The mobile platform ports all report back "Windows" to avoid this issue (and similar ones with other old games). But for a new release this check should be removed in the game script itself.

This is puzzling. The latest build of Gemini Rue for PC does *not* use the SnowRain plugin. The snowrain plugin caused some problems on some people's PCs, so we got a custom module made that does the same thing. Gemini Rue shouldn't require any plugins at all.

Is your eventual plan to have somehting that would help others put their AGS games into the apple store? Still there be plans for a versiont hat will make a standalone ipa file with the engine and game contained?

We at Wadjet Eye Games are planning to bring our games to the App Store very soon! The engine works just fine already (with a little jiggering) for building with a developer account (which is $99)

So, what's next?  Resonance? Primordia?   

I hope we can do all of them!

Dave posted a recruitment ad for someone to port AGS to Mac.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=47577.0

Having our back catalogue on Mac is something Wadjet Eye Games really wants to do.

Hopefully, if I provide nicely packaged installers for all the demos in their catalogue, I can convince Dave Gilbert to just sell native Linux versions of the games on Desura, Steam, and their website

We really want to release all our games on Linux before too long. We are concentrating on iOS for now but Linux is definitely on the list! We are mainly limited by manpower - there is only one of me, and I'm doing the ports. Linux should hopefully be easier as we won't have to change all the controls like we did on iOS.

- Janet from Wadjet Eye.

I mean both. There was a big change made in refactory branch (script interpreter). Then we created master branch and now working in there.
I hope it will become safe in a while, people are using it to play games, so these changes will be tested.

When was the unsafe change made? I have a beta of Gemini Rue on iOS running on the Wadjet Eye boards at the moment, and we are getting a lot of crash reports.

If you have a will to help, you are most welcome

I have a will but no time, since I am busy on the iOS ports of our game and will be even busier with a baby next spring.

[@JanetC]

@JanetC, also, a small note, seeing as you (https://github.com/JanetGilbert/ is your repository, right?) are merging our refactored code from time to time:
current 'ags/master' branch, while having more potential due to rewritten script interpreter (it is more compatible with 64-bit builds), is still considered a bit unstable (well, for the same reason ), and had new bugs in recent past. So if you are using your branch for shortly upcoming releases, I'd recommend not to update from our repository for some time.

Do you mean not to update from Refactory or master? Because I haven't updated in a while, but when I do, I use Refactory.

Thanks for the info on Mac, guys. Sounds like quite a task!

When you say "You could ask the Allegro Development list [1] how difficult porting Allegro 4 would be.", BigMc, I googled quickly and the Allegro downloads page seems to show that Allegro 4 is already Mac compatible. Am I not following something?

http://alleg.sourceforge.net/download.html

Everything seems a little quiet round here. Is there any current progress on a port of AGS to Mac? Because Wadjet Eye gets a tonne of requests for Mac versions of our games.

The notes on the OSX port at https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags read:

The OSX port is currently only interesting for developers.

Main reason for this is that it only runs on OSX versions 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or lower. Important frameworks used by Allegro 4 were removed in later releases.

What were these important frameworks, and how feasible is a working port?

I'd be grateful if you'd post a process on converting GR to iOS, especially what you ended up having to change to make it more tablet friendly in addition to the general porting itself.

Most of the code change was in the GRUE scripting, which I did on PC as normal in the AGS editor. The largest amount of time was involved in just making hotspots/buttons/icons/dialogue fonts etc bigger and other small changes to make it play better. I also added a new system of icons to compensate for no keyboard being available in the combat and box-pushing sections. I also removed all gameplay elements that needed a right-click.

On the engine side, on the Mac, I changed the way that tapping works from the default, which is designed to enable users of jailbroken devices to play PC games. I didn't need to worry about the engine being compatible with all out-of-the-box AGS games, just Wadjet Eye's games, so I altered the touch-screen controls for the way Wadjet Eye's games play. I also exposed some minor internal stuff in the engine to the scripting language (so that, for instance, the script can now tell whether we are on an iPad or not.)

I've just built a beta version of the game and sent it to testers, so fingers crossed it works on more than just my iPhone and Dave's iPad!

I still have one problem -- I copied over my old save games from my Mac where I am running Resonance using Crossover (and have already completed about half the game), into the same folder as above (i.e. /var/mobile/Documents/ags/game) as I noticed that is where AGS saved my initial "test" game. After doing this, all my Resonance save games from my Mac now appear properly in the load menu on the game running on my Ipad. However, when I try to load one of these saves, the app immediately crashes to the Ipad home screen without any error message. Any ideas? Is this a Resonance issue, AGS-general issue or AGS-IOS port issue? I tried tinkering with the save game file permissions but that didn't help.

I think it would be very unlikely that saved games from one platform would work on another, sorry

Just curious - is the only thing holding this back from working on non-jailbroken devices the cost? Nice work, man.

Yep. I've got it working on non-jailbroken devices, it was easy enough. You just need to give Apple $99 to get a developer account!

Does anyone know if I order Gemini Rue with the "BMT Order On CD" I get a CD in a DVD case with covers and everything?
It might sound as a stupid question but I thought this game was only available in CD as a preorder.

No, the pre-orders sold out a long time ago sorry.

A few games require navigation through keyboard inputs and, unfortunately, sometimes they require keys that aren't present on the iOS onscreen keyboard. Gemini Rue, for example, requires you use the CTRL key during combat and there's no CTRL key on the keyboard. There's actually a point where you have to hit CTRL or else you can't continue in the game, effectively making the game unplayable on iOS.

Heh, that's why I'm overhauling the Gemini Rue control system right now so that we can port it to iOS.